The toast of Brit-hop

It’s a brilliant, balmy winter day, and young Dylan Mills is drinking it all in -- from the sweeping city view to the beautiful people lounging on the pool deck of the Sunset Strip hotel -- as only someone from a place as dank as London’s East End can.

“This was my introduction to the world, Los Angeles,� the 19-year-old musician says, recalling his visit here to shoot a video last year. “It was my first time outside England, my first time on a plane.�

He pauses and shakes his head.

“Lots going on since I was last here, man. It’s been amazing!�

Lots going on indeed.

Mills is better known as Dizzee Rascal, and in that year he’s emerged from England’s dance/hip-hop world to become the toast of the British music scene. As a teenage studio loner, he devised a distinctive sound in the hybrid style known as garage. He began rapping on the circuit of pirate radio stations, clubs and raves and became a sensation on the scene with his single “I Luv You,� a clattering battle-of-the-sexes scenario about teen pregnancy.

After a bidding war he signed with XL Records, and his debut album, “Boy in Da Corner,� not only caught on commercially but also won England’s high-end Mercury Music Prize in a field of 12 nominees that included Radiohead and Coldplay.

One reason it might have resonated with his record-buying countrymen and the Mercury judges is that this young Rascal asserted himself as a distinctly British voice in a genre rife with imitations of American sounds.

His beats are strikingly minimal but full of atmosphere. On “Sittin’ Here� it’s just a plucking sound suggesting Japanese music, planted with deep bass explosions. Sometimes it’s just bass and electronic squeals, or something that sounds like a fragment of industrial rock.

Through these spare, cinematic settings, Rascal threads a strange, elastic voice that reshapes conventional words and Cockney slang into an exotic, personal language. He can be vulnerable and evocative, mourning the passing of youthful innocence and the loss of hope. In more aggressive moments he lashes out at social and personal repression with intimidating verbal flurries.

This arresting debut didn’t come out in the U.S. until last month, but vigilant U.S. scribes got import copies and voted it the No. 10 album of 2003 in the new Village Voice critics’ poll.

“That’s good, yeah?� says Dizzee Rascal when he’s told about the just-published poll. He might carry one of the biggest buzzes in pop, but his unfamiliarity with the prestigious annual ranking is a reminder that he’s a babe in the woods, learning as he goes.

Fortunately, learning has never been a problem for Dizzee. His manager, Nick Detnon, recalls his first meeting with him. Detnon was producing a session for a rapper named Wylie, and Dizzee came in with friends to sing on a chorus.

“The other kids were just hanging around,� Detnon says. “But he was asking, ‘What does this do? What does that do?’ Looking at the computer.... We talked, and he said, ‘Let me give you a couple of tunes.’ ... It was very different. I’ve never met a kid like him.

“He has got a very strong will after all that stuff that’s happened to him -- he’s had a very tough life. He’s a very old soul actually, he really is. When he came to me, he was like a moanin’ 50-year-old guy already. I don’t know a lot about that stuff, but he seems to have a very old soul.�

Time on the streets

Maybe the toughest moment in that life came last summer when he was attacked and stabbed five times. As he tersely puts it: “It was the first time I was stabbed. Violence ain’t new.� His assailants are still unknown, possibly in part because of Rascal’s adherence to the street code that frowns on “snitchin’.�

An only child, he spent a lot of time on the streets of Bow, his rough, multicultural neighborhood. His father died when he was young and he was raised by his mother, but despite her best efforts he kept finding trouble.

He was also drawn to music, especially the drum-and-bass he heard on pirate radio.

“It was limitless,� he says, sitting in the sun in a far corner of the pool area. “Thinking about it now, that’s why I liked it. It was so different, there was so much going on.� He was a voracious listener, absorbing everything from grunge to hip-hop (Jay-Z is one of his favorite rappers). And without planning it, he had his way out, once he started building beats on a computer at school.

“For me, music and radio and everythin’ was my avenue to do something better,� he says, speaking in a Cockney accent that’s buoyed by a Jamaican-like lilt. “I was missing a lot of things -- say there was a fight here, or a fight there, I missed it ‘cause I was in the studio, or I missed it ‘cause I was doin’ a rave. So that started happenin’ more and more.�

Music might have saved Dizzee from the streets, but he certainly didn’t keep the streets out of his music.

“I knew that I didn’t want to MC like everyone else was, and I was adamant about soundin’ like myself,� says Rascal, who will do a U.S. tour after his May 2 performance at the Coachella music festival in Indio. “ ‘Cause I was from England. That’s what I loved about hip-hop -- if I listened to a rapper from the Bronx I really got a sense of where they came from just by listenin’, the whole sound of what they were doing.

“In my music you definitely get a sense of inner-city London. I grew up in a council estate, what you might call projects over here. If I’m making music, it’s important to be able to express that end as well.... A lot of people didn’t know life was like that, they didn’t imagine that kind of life in London. Only the people that live in east London see that side of things.�

Rascal is animated when talking about making music, more guarded and dispassionate when the topic is that tough life. But he doesn’t hold anything back in his songs, which are drenched with a rich emotion that’s rare in hip-hop. “Sittin’ Here,� the album’s opening song, contains the lines “I watch all around, I watch every detail / I watch so hard I’m scared my eyes might fall.�

Rascal says that describes his method.

“Part of it was bein’ an only child,� he says. “You spend a lot of time on your own, always watching, observing, because you can’t always ask someone, ‘What is that?’ You have to work it all out for yourself. That’s part of it. The whole ‘boy in da corner’ thing -- that’s an angle where you can see everything. The whole album’s kind of from that perspective. That outlook from the corner, you see everything for what it is.�